The Books
Thought for Food

This comes from that late part of Edinburgh, frogs in the rain no the pavements and cherry blossom falling and the music cabinet we had, draped with Dan’s red and orange cloth – understanding myself more and living through the cold with blonde hair for the first time. Bus number 5, bus number 42. First outside a pottery shop, sometimes outside a church and once the buses were cancelled and I walked the way to Kaimes in the leaves in the autumn chill and I listened to this on a minidisk somewhere on a mix of The Wicker man soundtrack and random Talking Heads at the start of when I loved Talking Heads and at the end of Edinburgh.

What does any of it mean? Jon loved The Books. Did some-one from Edinburgh bring them on an import…some of the drums some-one said were like Nightbus. What does this mean? Here is a woman complaining of a heart condition, someone is wished luck, robots disintegrate and the tones stop. I don’t know what any of this music means, and it moves so quickly through so much…is this like my time of retelling where I thought of loaves of bread stacked up too fast in my head? The shift into seeing words as sounds, going out of your rationality but not to irrational things. Sound. Not being meaningless. The combination of acoustic guitars and beeps and whistles and words in ways I hadn’t heard before…this was truly alien only three years ago. Perhaps more than three years. We’ll say three years and ten months to be fair. And then reduce it to six. Such technology and these ideas have become commonplace now, flitting and flirting between these scenes, I am an insect alighting on no shoulders. There must be this act of faith. What does it mean? The music is so joyfully lacking in destination, but never direction. A strain of something “classical” (in the HMV sense) appears and stops too soon. Are you with me? Are you with me? The scratchy and bored cello and gay couple appear. Do you like my ankles? Yes. You can hear the chopping of vegetables, tersely. All sound appearing.

Where do the Books come from? I notice this track is called “All our base are belong to them” and I look over at the flyer Ghostboy (Jason) did for me during a Great Admirers gig…where did that phrase come from first? He said he saw it somewhere…who knows. This music is more space than object, but what of the space it creates? I don’t know how to describe it. It’s not even a rainbow-like object, I can put my hands on it, but it continues to move. I don’t know what to do about this. I hate fireworks. They go off in the street and make me jump. I hear a whole chorus of them as a small child is looking for his parents. The way the music jumps around adds to this…is it a carnival atmosphere they are hoping for? I feel instead like I’m in a film where it starts and stops too frequently, too many lights all at once and I feel ill. It gets to the point where I can’t differentiate adequately between the music, the fireworks outside, or the sound of imaginary (and hence undefeatable) intruders.

I feel I have little to say about this album and maybe that’s the point.